Chaldean Gematria Calculator

What the Chaldean cipher is

The Chaldean cipher gives each letter a value from 1 to 8 according to how it sounds, not where it sits in the alphabet. Letters that share a sound share a number: B, K and R are all 2; C, G, L and S are all 3. No letter is 9.

Because the grouping is phonetic, the Chaldean value of a word can be quite different from its Pythagorean or ordinal value, and it is the one English table on this site whose logic is not “position in the alphabet”. It is used almost exclusively in numerology — for names, business names and dates — rather than in scriptural gematria, but it is included here because “Chaldean gematria” is a common search and because the comparison with the alphabetical ciphers is instructive.

The table, by sound

The sound-family descriptions are the traditional rationale, not a linguistic analysis; several groupings (G with C and S, X with E and H) do not hold up phonetically, which is one reason the table should be read as a convention rather than a discovery.

Why there is no 9

In Cheiro’s presentation the number 9 is set apart as sacred and complete, and no letter is allowed to carry it^{[1] Source: Cheiro’s Book of Numbers}. A word’s total can of course be 9 or reduce to 9 — “love” is 3 + 7 + 6 + 5 = 21 → 3, but other words land on 9 — and Chaldean numerologists interpret such totals normally. The exclusion is only at the letter level, and only in this system: Pythagorean assigns 9 to I and R.

Cheiro and the “Chaldean” claim

The table in its modern form comes from William John Warner, who wrote as Cheiro, a celebrity palmist and numerologist of the early twentieth century. Cheiro’s Book of Numbers (1926) presents the values as an ancient system “of the Chaldeans” transmitted through Hebrew tradition^{[1] Source: Cheiro’s Book of Numbers}. That claim has never been substantiated. The Chaldeans of history were the Neo-Babylonian dynasty of the sixth century BCE; they wrote cuneiform, which has no alphabet to number, and their genuine mathematical legacy is the base-60 system^{[4] Source: Sexagesimal} — nothing to do with A = 1.

What can be said is that the 1–8 sound-based chart is stable across the numerology literature from Cheiro onward, that it is consistently distinguished from the Pythagorean chart^{[2] Source: Numerology}, and that Gematrinator and other calculators reproduce Cheiro’s letter groups exactly^{[3] Source: Gematrinator calculator}. As with every table on this site, the arithmetic is well defined; the antiquity is not.

Compound and reduced numbers

Chaldean practice reads two numbers for a name. The compound number is the plain total — 21, 37, 43 — and is interpreted in its own right; the single number is its digit root. The tile above gives the compound total with the reduced digit beneath it. Live examples: Cheiro = 23 · Chaldean = 27 · love = 21 · Jesus = 18 · fortune = 37.

Chaldean vs Pythagorean

The two charts agree on A–E (1–5) and on J, K, L, M and N, then part company everywhere else. Reading Chaldean first, then Pythagorean: F 8 / 6, G 3 / 7, H 5 / 8, I 1 / 9, O 7 / 6, P 8 / 7, Q 1 / 8, R 2 / 9, S 3 / 1, T 4 / 2, U 6 / 3, V 6 / 4, W 6 / 5, X 5 / 6, Y 1 / 7, Z 7 / 8. Chaldean also caps at 8, so its totals run a little lower. The comparison article takes this further, including how the two systems handle dates and what practitioners claim for each.